


Stars, Hide Your Fires

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-02-17 00:10:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13065060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: He dreams ofhertoo. He dreams of all the different ways he could kill her — choking, drowning, stabbing. He dreams that he’s holding her, the pads of his gloved thumbs tracing her face as his red saber scythes through her body, as her head lolls back, and he feels her brush of consciousness leave his mind. And then he wakes up, utterly terrified, her name on his lips, realizing that the anger was never fully real to begin with.That’s when he starts trying to feel her again. He closes his eyes andreaches— out into that black space that always used to betheirs— and encounters the highest, thickest, virtual steel wall he’s ever seen. It makes him nostalgic for everything that came before this yawning gulf between them. He remembers the smell of salt spray from Ahch-To, the explosive feeling of her fingertips on his bare palm, thewantingthat sizzled between them across galaxies.He thinks,that’s how it’s always been. A million, trillion miles of space and stars and sun and blackness dividing us, and she’s always felt close enough to touch.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Macbeth [ASIDE]
> 
> "The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step  
> On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,  
> For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;  
> Let not light see my black and dark desires.  
> The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be  
> Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see."
> 
> \- _Macbeth_ , Act I, Scene IV

When Rey does manage to sleep, she dreams of darkness. 

She dreams of black holes in space, of that darkly seductive sea cave back on Ahch-To, and in her worst moments — black hair, blacker eyes, and a stare so sharp, you could cut your teeth on it.

The ghost of Luke’s words resonate in her ears — _you went straight to the dark. You didn’t even fight it_ — and now she wonders if there’s something fundamentally wrong with her. She didn’t grow up with this concept of cosmic battling, of light versus dark, of age-old enmities. Back home on Jakku, there was no room for right or wrong, only survival. So what does it say about her that she is so very easily swayed, so inexplicably pulled to this...this darkness? 

_You went straight to the dark. You didn’t even fight it._

From Jakku, Rey remembers a boy named Mekhi, fifteen and beautiful when she was thirteen and scrawny. He'd stare at her while she was dropping off used parts at Niima Outpost, once coming too close and trying to touch her under her shirt. She'd broken his nose in retaliation. 

She’s used to the unsettling feeling of being watched now, though it still pales in comparison to what she associates with _him_ —

OK. So if she’s being honest, maybe she’s always been a little weak for dark-haired boys with brokenness in their smiles. Or eyes. You know, since _he_ never actually smiles.

And he is very clearly not a boy.

\-------

He is so very, _very_ angry. The fury burns in his brain and sizzles in his veins, a red hot brand of twisted, volatile emotion that demands to be sated. He paces, feeling hatred for her pulse through every atom of his body, every particle of their Bond. He screams obscenities into the empty space — _How dare you! YOU! A NOBODY! In what world could you imagine that refusing ME means I wouldn’t DESTROY YOU_ — and like a child, he hopes she can hear him.

He force chokes General Hux so badly that he’s immediately dispatched to the Med Bay, orders the slaughter of a hundred innocent civilians on Baatu, and spends hours training with his saber, smashing through spaceship walls until he dreams of burning and screaming, of red arcs glowing through circles of darkness.

He dreams of _her_ too. He dreams of all the different ways he could kill her, through choking, drowning or stabbing. He dreams that he’s holding her, the pads of his gloved thumbs tracing her face as his red saber scythes through her body, as her head lolls back, and he feels her brush of consciousness leave his mind. And then he wakes up, utterly terrified, her name on his lips, realizing that the anger was never fully real to begin with. 

That’s when he starts trying to feel her again. He closes his eyes and _reaches_ out into that black space that always used to be theirs — only to encounter the highest, thickest, virtual steel wall he’s ever seen. It makes him nostalgic for everything that came before this yawning gulf between them. He remembers the smell of salt spray from Ahch-To, the explosive feeling of her fingertips on his bare palm, the _wanting_ that sizzled between them across galaxies.

He thinks, _that’s how it’s always been. A million, trillion miles of space and stars and sun and blackness dividing us, and she’s always felt close enough to touch._

Of course, there’d been that other time, the first time Snoke had connected them, when she’d shot up in bed, instinctively firing a blaster pistol at him before he could say, _good morning, sunshine._ Jakku had honed her fight-or-flight instincts razor sharp, priming her for a lifetime of hardship. He guessed those survival instincts ran deep, though he couldn’t fault her that. He’d been fascinated by her ferocity, never wanting to actually hurt her, but she’d always been the first one to take up her sword and cross it with his.

Back in the snowy woods of Starkiller Base, the site of their first battle, he’d wished she weren’t quite so beautiful. He still does.

The worst of it was remembering the battle in Snoke’s throne room. He remembers how they’d stood back to back, and moved in perfect sync, slashing and maiming, perfectly united through their Force Bond. Through it all, he’d felt a wild thrill of delight, a sense of purpose where he’d once felt only emptiness. He’d taken it to mean that this was what he was supposed to be doing, with _her,_ forever. 

He’d never felt so utterly complete, so at peace with the symmetry of his own life — a feeling that lasted right up to the last second where she’d split his lightsaber in half and abandoned him. The next time he’d seen her, she’d been sitting in the pilot seat of the _Falcon_ , peppering his army with blaster shots, his enemy once again.

Kylo doesn’t have a name for the emotion rising up within him. He won’t — he _refuses_ — to speak of it, and so he trains for lack of anything better to do, his body bearing the marks of the agony she inspires.

 _Rey,_ he calls out to her, in moments of weakness, _Rey, please let me in._ One day soon, he promises himself that he’ll smash that fucking wall of hers down around her ears.

\-------

She discovers that keeping him out of her head is hard work.

She can feel him pounding out a seemingly incessant assault on the edges of her consciousness, and she knows that to let him in, even for a second, would be a kind of death. How utterly fucking stupid she’d been, to think that she could have saved Ben Solo. He brought out the worst in her, he epitomized the worst of the Jedi traits — a sense of hubris that history had proven led only to suffering. Clearly, she was still the same sad, little girl who’d stayed on Jakku and waited for her no-account, junkie parents to come and bring her home. But they hadn't come back then, and they certainly weren’t coming now.

_You come from nothing. You’re nothing. But not to me._

The memory unleashes a wave of emotion that jerks her off balance. Pain breaks through her concentration, pulverizing that wall she’s built up, and for a second, she sees a flickering profile — a chin, a face, dark hair, midnight eyes — and then, just as fast, he’s turning to her, instinctively _searching_ —

And Rey doesn’t hesitate, doesn't even breathe. She squeezes her eyes shut, throwing that wall back up again with _everything_ she has, building it higher and thicker, shoving the hot, hard ball of emotion deeper into her chest. The effort of it tears a scream free from her throat. A live wire of desire buzzes it’s way up her spine, straight through to her brain. 

She tells herself that to let Kylo in would be deadly to the other rebels, and to the Resistance. She can’t let him see, can’t compromise their location. She _won’t._

For the first time, she understands why Luke closed himself off to the Force.

\-------

She keeps busy, and that’s maybe the best thing she can do. For now, the rebels have taken up camp on Iego, and there’s plenty of work to be done rebuilding the _Falcon_ , re-wiring cables in the hangars, amassing weapons, and poring over attack strategies.

General Leia Organa tasks Poe and Rey with rounding up any rebel sympathizers they can find on the remote planet, and they spend a week together, flying the _Falcon_ through Iego’s moons, reasoning with angels. 

The first time Poe sees one, he’s awestruck, while Rey is only slightly less impressed. A beacon of pure, glowing white, it descends slowly, six wings fluttering madly. Rey only speaks a little Galactic, while Poe has a stronger grasp on the dialect. He speaks calmly, raising his hands in a gesture of goodwill. That angel, it turns out, is not impressed with the rebel mission, though they do have some success with six others. 

The seventh, it turns out has _no_ patience, and whips out a sword so fast that Rey feels it whisper by, missing her side by a hair. She spins, landing a palm strike to the underside of the jaw, learning the hard way that angels’ faces are diamond hard. Nursing her wounded hand, she gets kicked in the ribs and goes tumbling down.

She rolls and somersaults right back up, flipping behind the angel, and firing off a shot that lands just wide of the wings. 

“Hey!” Poe calls out, from somewhere left of her. “Hey, you big, ugly feather face. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

Rey exhales, hearing his blaster shot whistle overhead. She gulps air madly, trying to remember her training, trying to remember to _breathe_. She definitely doesn’t think of _him_ , doesn’t think about the way _he_ always taught her to let the world fall away, to focus on the target at hand. Her fingers find the trigger.

She takes the angel’s face off in one clean shot.

“Nice,” Poe teases, “did you finally realize that blasters really are more effective than using this Force everyone talks about?”

Rey shudders. She doesn’t know how to tell him that she’s worried the Force has deserted her, that it’s lost somewhere behind the giant, fucking wall she erected to keep herself safe from Kylo. And she would meditate, except that she doesn’t know how to separate meditation from the Force, either. She only knows that if she closes her eyes and opens her mind, then he’ll be _there,_ back in her head. It'll be like she never left.

But Poe mistakes her shudder for an injury, and he crosses the distance between them in a second, his big hand chafing her small, cold one. “Rey,” he asks, his voice lower, more urgent, “are you hurt?” His left fingertips graze her face gently, searching for blood or bruising, and—

Rey’s mind _explodes_ —

She can feel the force of his anger ricocheting across the galaxy, the raw, sheer strength of it sending her inner walls flying. She’s scrambling for some form of cover, but his emotions are screeching wordlessly in her ears, worse than any migraine she could ever dream up. 

Lights and noise pound at the edges of her consciousness. Rey squeezes her eyes shut, balls her hands into fists.

 _You’re just jealous._

Instantly, as if she’d flicked a switch, the screaming dies down to a whisper. His voice is sharp and deadly in her ears — and _oh,_ how she doesn’t want to admit that she missed it.

_If he touches you again, I’ll fucking kill him._

_That’s healthy, Kylo._

_No one ever said I was a well adjusted humanoid, Rey._ And then, whisper soft, exhaled almost as an afterthought — 

_I miss you._

She’s startled by that. Actually, if she’s being honest, it scares her half to fucking death. So she reaches back inside the place where she’s buried all of her pain and all of her confusion — and she rips the connection away. It’s brutal. It feels like tearing off her own skin, like peeling back her own fingernails, but she does it.

Everything takes a little while to come back into focus after that, but it takes even longer for the blood to stop hammering in her temples. Darkness swims behind her eyes, a bruise blooming on her shoulder, and she imagines miniature, shattered galaxies of blood cells stirring under the skin. Above her, Iego’s many moons shimmer weirdly, a kaleidoscope of oranges and blues and greens. This place is a rainbow of muted colors with no black in sight. Nothing here should remind her of the color of his eyes, except that it does.

“Woah,” Poe says, his only comment. He doesn’t try to touch her again.

\-------

Rey doesn’t sleep that night, or the next, nor the one after that either. Technically, Chewy’s supposed to be the one doing repair work on the ships, but Rey contents herself with soldering and wiring cables while everyone else is sleeping. She likes this sort of work. Machinery has always made much more sense to her than people, anyway.

Outside the rebel base, Iego’s skies are sleepy with winter, one moon an anemic blue, another a shimmering sheen of lilac, the third a sluggish green. Any buildings she can see glint dully, mirroring the light of various moons. Darkness bruises the rest of the sky black, an unnatural contrast to all the colors. Something white flutters in the distance, trailing gold sparks. Another angel?

Rey steps outside the door of the spaceship and lies on her back. The ground is cold, but she doesn’t mind. There’s nothing she likes better than staring up at the skies, at the galaxies, at all the planets. When she was a child, looking to the universe and imagining different ways of life was her only means of escape from a lifetime of drudgery. 

_Just look at me now, a Jedi,_ she wishes she could tell ten-year-old Rey. _Well sort of, anyway._ She doesn’t mean to sleep, but the fatigue sneaks up on her suddenly.

\-------

Rey dreams of the color red.

It’s the same color as Snoke’s throne room, the same color that Snoke bled out after Kylo’s lightsaber sawed him in two, the same color as the uniforms worn by the Praetorian guards. 

_Won’t you come with me?_ Dream-Kylo asks her, one gloved fist extended. A single drop of blood drips down his cheek, and his black eyes glow against all that red. A blade of light scythes between the two of them, throwing the shadows of his face into sharp relief. _I did this for you. Remember? We have to kill the past to start again. Come rule the world with me, Rey._

Rey blinks sleepily. She can feel the sincerity of his words ringing true in her gut. And she can feel the pull of him too — darkness to her light, a Force-dictated balance.

_Darkness rises, and light to meet it._

Together, do they cancel out all of each other’s flaws? Light and darkness, fusing as one? Is that her greater destiny? She is too tired to figure it out. Curling into herself drowsily, she asks instead, _Why am I so drawn to you?_

Kylo doesn’t ever smile, but Rey thinks she sees his lips quirk. _I ask myself that every day._

_But what’s wrong with me?_

Kylo stretches languidly, absurdly defensive on her behalf. _Nothing’s wrong with you. I prefer to think of your darkness as a part of you, rather than who you are. Your resilience and grit give you strength. You're unwilling to die. Some might see those things as dark. ___

_So at what point does darkness become evil? When it forces its host to resort to murder?_ Rey makes her voice as hard and accusatory as she can, a difficult task when she is this exhausted. _You have committed untold atrocities._

He doesn’t even blink. _It’s true. I am a monster._

_But you’re here with me._

His mouth softens, looking at her. _There’s nowhere else in the galaxy I’d rather be._

His chin raises to meet her curious gaze, his black eyes hooded. She wonders how he felt that night in the Jedi temple, wonders what went through his mind the moment he awoke to Luke's saber spitting sparks overhead. She thinks about how pain has cleaved empty swatches of space into both of their lives, leaving room for darkness to slip in, but how — she believes, _hopes, despite all odds_ — the capacity for goodness still exists. Compassion wells up in her like a flood. Maybe they are not so different after all. 

She's overcome with the desire to heal, to comfort. _You’re not alone._

His eyes are so, so black. They go on and on and on. _Neither are you._

Electricity sizzles between the two of them. Rey has always marveled at stupid girls who say physically improbable things like _he made me melt_ ; and yet, here was her body, doing it’s best impression of warm butter. 

The blush heats up her cheeks, and she reaches out a hand, bridging the distance. Kylo exhales sharply like he’s surprised, all the air leaving his lungs abruptly, and that’s when the shift occurs. The balance between them breaks, just as Rey tears herself fully from the dream and comes back to reality. 

She opens her eyes, and _there he is_ , levitating a foot above the ground, the grey dawn light chipping little prisms of color across his face. Simultaneously, she’s in some sort of bedroom, aboard a spaceship she doesn’t recognize. 

Embarrassed by her own vulnerability, horrified to realize this isn't a dream, Rey is enraged. “Get the _fuck_ out of my head,” she hisses, maniacally. “Get out, GET OUT.” 

“Rey,” Kylo pleads, holding his palms up in supplication. “You should know. I would never, _ever_ hurt you.” 

"Fuck you," she spits, wishing she had her blaster on her, or really just _anything_ to make him hurt the way she's hurting now. There is nothing adequate to express this tearing inside of her —this conflict of light and dark, pain and pleasure, confusion and certainty— and so she screams her release aloud. The air between them _ripples_ , a reflection of mutual power, and she staggers forward, terrified, drawn by his inevitable pull. _Enemy_ , her mind hisses, her palms burning for lack of weapon, a wild, primal thrum in her veins. And _yet—_

“Rey,” Kylo says gently, and gravity doesn't hold her down anymore; he does. He’s moving towards her with _that_ look in his eyes, the one she remembers from right before he asked her to come with him. His steps are steady; he's sure of himself, of this course he's chosen. And she knows, that if she lets him touch her now, if she lets this twisted, thorny thing inside of her ribcage grow to fruition, then she’ll never get it back out again. She’ll never be whole; she'll never resurrect her heart; she'll never be able to come back from this. _Rip it out. Kill it._

The ground underneath her knees cracks, a matching fissure to the one in her heart. Kylo starts to flicker in and out, his hand an inch away from her own. 

"Don't do this!" He stretches, flexes his fingers, desperate to meet her, but she throws up the strongest whirlwind she’s ever managed to conjure, and his head snaps backwards, as he whips through the air like a rag doll. 

He’s gone before he ever hits the ground. 

____

\-------

Over a trillion miles away, Kylo opens his eyes in his bedroom aboard the _Supremacy._

He smiles. “Rey,” he whispers through the Bond. “I’m coming for you.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At night, the loneliness pulses in her head and beats in the pads of the fingers, and rips a red, raw trail of anguish through her body. She looks to the sky and consoles herself _they’ll come back for me_ , because what other alternative is possible? She knows the importance of patience; all scavengers do. To scour through shifting sands, searching for parts to sell, scrubbing grime off of old relics, you _have_ to be patient.
> 
> He retreats from her mind. Softly he says, _they’re never coming back for you._
> 
> Furious, desperate, she arches her back and twists her hands in her constraints, while he looks on. The charged silence is interspersed with her choked exhalations — _you don’t know anything; they love me; they’re coming back_ —
> 
> He only watches her, the play of emotions hardening his face. There’s something rigid in the curve of his jaw, the set of his mouth, and she can sense...the latent darkness in him, his compassion for her, and their mutual loneliness, all whirling together in sensations so acute, she sees them play out as actual starbursts of color behind her eyes…
> 
> This is what she remembers: she’d thought she was the loneliest person in the galaxy until she’d met him.

This is what she remembers: manacles chafing at her wrists, darkness pressing down on her from above, a chill worming its way from her spine to her heart. 

_You wish to kill me,_ a voice says, distorted and disembodied.

 _That’s what happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask,_ she snaps back, panicked, thrashing wildly against her constraints. 

He considers. There is a slight hiss in the air as the mask comes off, and he returns her stare, puzzled and disarmingly unthreatening. Right now, she is only an anomaly to him, an enigma to solve and compartmentalize — but later, she will grow to be so much _more._ Later, she will learn about the significance of that mask: how he’s worn it unceasingly, only ever taking it off to sleep and shower, how she’s the first person in years that he’s allowed to look him in the eyes. 

She blinks, confused, and he blinks calmly back at her. _Tell me about the droid,_ he says. 

She takes a detached approach. _He’s a BB unit with a selenium drive and a thermal hyperscan_ —

 _He’s carrying a section of a navigational chart,_ he interrupts. _We have the rest, recovered from the archives of the Empire, but we need the last piece, and somehow you convinced the droid to show it to you._

She averts her eyes. 

_You, a scavenger._

She’s not looking at him, though she can still sense his burning curiosity. Unspoken questions crackle the air — who are you? What are you? Why are you the way that you are? Why do I feel this, _this, whatever this is_ —

She knows how dangerous the longing for intimate knowledge is, knows how understanding vulnerabilities and mannerisms can transform someone from _enemy_ to _human_. 

_You know I can take whatever I want._

She grits her teeth and snarls, daring him to try. He ignores her, hunkering down. _Why are you so lonely?_

In her mind, she’s back on Jakku, howling as Unkar Plutt’s meaty claws sink into her upper arm. She’s _hungry,_ the common mantra of her childhood, curling up as small and unobtrusively as possible within the hull of an abandoned Imperial transport. Her fingers are bloody, the result of days spent repairing the Ghtroc freighter, stolen from her by Devi and Strunk, just as soon as she’d flown it to Niima Outpost. She hugs a green spine-barrel plant to her chest, vows, _if a flower can survive on this barren wasteland, then so can I._ At night, the loneliness pulses in her head and beats in the pads of the fingers, and rips a red, raw trail of anguish through her body. She looks to the sky and consoles herself _they’ll come back for me,_ because what other alternative is possible? She knows the importance of patience; all scavengers do. To scour through shifting sands, searching for parts to sell, scrubbing grime off of old relics, you _have_ to be patient.

He retreats from her mind. Softly he says, _they’re never coming back for you._

Furious, desperate, she arches her back and twists her hands in her constraints, while he looks on. The charged silence is interspersed with her choked exhalations — _you don’t know anything; they love me; they’re coming back; wait and see_ —

He only watches her, the play of emotions hardening his face. There’s something rigid in the curve of his jaw, the set of his mouth, and she can sense...the latent darkness pulsing in him, his compassion for her, and their mutual loneliness, all whirling together in sensations so acute, she sees them play out as actual starbursts of color behind her eyes…

This is what she remembers: she’d thought she was the loneliest person in the galaxy until she’d met him.

\-------

“Leia,” Rey wheezes, a stitch in her left side, the beginnings of a tick pulsing behind one of her eyes, “General Organa.”

She’s run all the way back to base on what felt like only two breaths of air (and she can’t breathe; she hasn’t been able to properly breathe since he was last in her head). Grit crackles between her teeth. There’s dirt smeared across her cheekbones and twigs tangling in her hair. She has never looked more like a scavenger. 

By contract, Leia is majestic. Outfitted in loose fitting pants and a plain tunic, the Resistance insignia gleaming just beneath her neck, she merely cocks an eyebrow. A lifetime of danger has dulled her capacity for shock and awe. “Yes? What is it?”

“Kylo,” Rey sinks to her knees, panting heavily, “It’s Kylo. He knows where we are, and he’s coming for us. We have to leave now.”

If there’s anything that could ripple those serene features, it’s mention of her son. Princess Leia Organa of the Royal House of Alderaan was born into a world already plunged into darkness. As a teenager, she wielded her diplomatic immunity to run covert operations. She grew up to kill Jabba the Hutt, to watch her homeworld burn before her eyes, to become General of the Resistance, to move beyond the murder of the only man she ever loved.

And yet, the ghost of everything Ben Solo could have been and never was is enough to bring her to her knees. 

Leia’s face flickers, then steadies. She knows they don’t have the manpower to take on the First Order, only the capacity, the blind hope that with a head start, they might be able outrun them. “Alright. Ready the X-wings.”

Rey dips her head in deference, bites back the _I’m so sorry_ dancing on her tongue.

\-------

Of course, they _almost_ make it to Hoth without incident.

The majority of the rebel fighters have already landed safely planetside, with Leia, Rey, Chewy and Poe bringing up the rear — when a cacophony of TIE fighters split the sky, lasers blazing.

“Shit,” Rey mutters, echoing Chewy’s burr of alarm. Static buzzes in her ear, Leia telling her not to panic, not to exchange fire, only to lose them. _This is no time to be a hero_. Across a spattering of silver stars, Poe’s X-wing barrel rolls beautifully, narrowly avoiding a stream of cannon blasts.

Weaving from side to side, Rey leads one of her pursuers into a tight loop, pulling up at the last second so that the TIE collides with its fellow fighter in a blast of fire. Poe’s raspy cheer echoes in her headset, but there’s another fighter locked on her tail, a Silencer she hasn’t seen before, and she knows, she _knows_ — 

Ignoring Leia’s earlier warning, she pulls away from formation, blasting at Kylo with laser shots that he methodically, almost lazily dodges. _I’ll give you lazy, you asshole,_ she thinks, through a hot haze of rage, and then she dives into a series of feints and last-minute reverses, managing to crash another ship in the process, though Kylo remains steady on her tail.

She very nearly careens into him, but corrects her course just in time, racing barely ahead of him through a silver spangled universe. Chewy bellows in her ear. 

“I know,” Rey says begrudgingly, “I know, he’s a good pilot.” _Lethal and smart, like his dad,_ she thinks, then retracts that last statement immediately, a lump in her throat. _No, not like his dad._

Cannonfire clips at her shields, but it’s only peripheral, not from Kylo, who seemingly refuses to shoot at her at all. _Asshole,_ she thinks again, irrationally, unwilling to examine the weight on her chest. Accelerating to breakneck pace, she loops upside down, pulling up at the last second to drop a few hundred feet.

Unfortunately, Kylo’s reflexes are just as sharp. He copies her move exactly, avoiding any kind of collision. Chewy roars.

“I know!” Rey bellows back at him in frustration. “I _know_ we have to lose him before we go to hyperdrive. Can’t you see I’m _trying_?” 

Chewy grunts in admonishment.

“Oh, that's helpful. What do you mean, do something that he’s not expecting?”

The Wookie only shrugs, but that’s when Rey has an idea. Closing her eyes, she opens up her mind and _reaches_ out into the familiar blackness —

The result is cataclysmic: gasoline meeting fire, a voracious explosion of emotion ricocheting in her skull. She jerks back from the impact. At first she only hears her name, but then all of his feelings come flooding through the shared gateway: a tangling, swirling mix of passion and fear.

 _Rey!_

She can feel his wild, reckless burst of joy that she was the one to reach out to him. She can feel his caution, as he doesn’t want to scare her away. She can feel his pain, derived from what he perceives as her abandonment of him. And— his _desire_ : a band of reckless, pulsating, white hot light.

 _What? You weren’t expecting that?_ Then, low, dark and rich, making the hair on her arms stand up in response: _You must know how I feel about you._

His sensations burn indelibly into the Bond, and she gasps, her heart turning fucking traitor in her chest. Speeding the X-Wing further forward, she tries to outrun the black thrill of battle, the memory of his hands in hers. If she could fly him out of her system, she would. 

_You’re lonely,_ he tells her, _lonely like me._

The Bond between them hums happily, catching Rey off guard with the _rightness_ of it. Over the years, they’ve both tried to crush down feelings, a reaction to their hostile environments, though largely without success. Raw emotion burns too bright in both of them, an overflow of passion. 

_Passion belongs to the Dark,_ she tells him. 

_Is this why the Jedi are celibate?_

_I’m not a Jedi. Not really, anyway_ , she snarls, her thoughts in a tangle.

Kylo doesn’t laugh, but she can feel his amusement flicker through the Bond. Unbidden, she thinks about the last time she’d let him in her head, when they’d stood back-to-back in a crimson draped throne room, sabers in hand, blood singing, adrenaline racing, hearts on fire. 

_Don’t be afraid. I feel it too._

_I hate you_ , she growls, no real rancor to her words, and his silence is answer enough. 

_Don't be sad_ , he murmurs, and she is horrified as the Bond turns... _tender._ Shame engulfs her, that she can feel _this way_ for the man who murdered Han Solo, who broke Leia Organa's heart and drove Luke Skywalker into hiding. Kylo is responsible for the death of a thousand souls and for the galaxy's pain; he is the enemy, and he cannot be forgiven, not ever. Except— 

Her hands are hot against her thighs and her breath comes in gasps, the windshield growing blurry before her eyes. When he is in her head like this, she can forget that all around them is a stinging whirl of hatred threatening to encapsulate everything. What is wrong with her, that she cannot avenge the people she loves? 

He pushes _comfort_ through the Bond in the face of her anguish, and she realizes that what she is fighting against is familiarity —familiarity of such magnitude that it borders on fate. It's the kind of recognition that promises _home_ and _love_ and _meaning_ , powerful things, and not easily turned away. This sense of profound recognition has been there even when they were strangers, even when he'd strapped her to a chair on board the _Supremacy_ and interrogated her beneath a mask.

Because Kylo has never really been a stranger to her, and that's the problem. A call echoes between them, even now, and in the depths of her soul where she knows there should only be disgust and enmity for a foe comes a pull of intense longing. He is her foil: his Dark to her Light, compelled to her just as she is to him. 

Starlines stream past in a black river, while she battles with herself, grits her teeth and centers her mind. She sees them locked in this endless, circular skirmish —always running, always fighting, always wanting —forever, unless she can end it now.

She steels herself. _Kylo?_

His answer is low and soft, but worst of all, hopeful. 

_I’m here._

Vindictive, Rey pushes awful, torturous memories through the Bond: Han falling to blackness, Leia weeping and broken, Finn unconscious in the snow, Poe screaming through a mind search, Baatu citizens bloodied and dying, Rey with her hands bound, a red saber pressed to her cheek…

Kylo falters, concentration momentarily broken, and it’s all Rey needs. Speeding forward in a rush of exhilaration, she arcs downward, pulls the ship into hyperspace and goes blue.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux’s mouth curves. “Careful Ren,"he quips, “your compassion is showing.”
> 
> Kylo _snarls_. Blind with rage, he hauls Hux up in a vice-like grip, watching grimly as his General’s eyes bulge with pressure. He takes pleasure in twitching his fingers just _so_ , letting the darkness spiral through him, reveling in the ensuing maelstrom of anger-pain-fear. “Speak to me like this again,” he whispers, “and I’ll kill you in the slowest, most painful way I can imagine. And know that I am creative.”
> 
> Released, the General sprawls to his feet, coughing and massaging his throat. “Understood, sir.”
> 
> It’s then that Kylo hears the distant hum of ancient, ingrained power, of something evil and dormant being suddenly awakened. A jagged spurt of light cries out under the weight of darkness, and something in the Force _tilts_ , in a way that nothing ever should.
> 
> Kylo cocks his head. He feels….death, despair. _Rey.._.
> 
> His pulse spikes. “I must go,” he tells Hux, doing his best impression of a man under control. “I'm needed elsewhere."

They say that Force Sensitive beings acquire their powers by three known means: inheritance (from another Force-sensitive progenitor), mutation or evolution, and artificial manifestation. In Ben Solo’s case, there was never really a question of _will he_ or _won’t he_ — his bloodline simply dictated the inevitable.

Throughout her pregnancy, Leia feels Ben’s presence growing within her, like a living band of light, interspersed with pulsing veins of darkness. She finds that he is attuned to her moods, often reacting to any spikes of emotion with unusual displays of physicality.

In late October, one month before her due date, she returns from a dedication ceremony of a new statue of her adoptive father, Bail Organa, on the Hosnian Prime System. The ceremony did not go well, as Leia’s efforts to inspire the senators to stop bickering fell on deaf ears. While she is deep in contemplation regarding the nature of her uncertain political future, Ben gives vent to his own feelings with a well-timed _punch_ to her uterus, shoving himself forward on tiny feet the doctors swear aren't developed yet.

“Holy hell,” she pants, doubling over in pain, and Han shoots up from the chair in which he’s been soldering wires for the past half hour.

Leia presses his hand to her belly, watches Han’s eyes go from big to bigger. Against the pale skin of her stomach, her husband’s fingers are rough and dirty, stained through with the axle grease of galaxies. “Feel that? That’s our son,” she breathes, and watches tenderness transform her husband’s face.

An hour later, Han sips on Corellian whiskey while Leia nurses a seltzer, staring out the window at the snow capped mountains of Kor Vella, Coronet’s largest tourist haven. _Han grew up here_ , she muses, thinking that _home_ allows her husband to wear his protective swagger a little more loosely. She doubts that Corellia will ever feel like a true home to her, not when Alderaan will always have the biggest piece of her. 

“So,” Han breaks the companionable silence between them, “you going to tell me how the ceremony went?” Behind him, dusk slants large fingers of dying light through the plate glass windows. A CR90 corvette whizzes lazily past, stationing itself at a warship dock a few stories below.

Leia crunches ice between her teeth, swishes the seltzer in her mouth before swallowing. Her stomach is still in knots. “Not well. I’ve begun to lose faith that the government can function any longer.”

She sees a flicker of satisfaction in her husband’s eyes, there and gone before she can pounce on it. “Does that mean you’ll quit as a senator once your term is up?”

Leia scowls into her glass. “And just _what_ is that supposed to mean?”

“That you’ve been home exactly once in the past two months,” Han shoots back unapologetically, “And during all this time away, you’ve effectively accomplished nothing. Don’t you want to be home for our son?”

Leia clenches her fists so tightly that her nails make little rivets in her palms. She is tired of this, of their contrary personalities and constant bickering. _I was never going to be the wife who sits at home and bakes you apple pies, who tends to all your children with patience and grace_ , she wants to say, but doesn’t —and resents him for not knowing this about her already. She and Han may have helped to save the galaxy as they know it, but communication has never been one of their strong points. “And you?” She snarls, lashing out defensively. “Do you really enjoy the life of a racer? Bouncing around from one system to the next, working on ships, never knowing where you’re headed next?”

“Doesn’t sound that different from being a member of the Rebel Alliance, sweetheart,” he sneers, the _sweetheart_ sounding like less of an endearment and more like something that you scrape off the bottom of your shoe. 

Leia feels her Force signature tense up. It coils underneath itself, thorny and threatened. “You’re an arrogant brat, you know that flyboy?”

He half laughs, then drawls, “Don’t even get me started on you, Your Worshipness.”

She skewers him with her eyes. “Why, you —”

A rush of wind, a spike of raw emotion — and the mirror next to Leia shatters in two, a huge hunk of glass falling to the floor as if in slow motion. Just before it hits the ground, it hovers eerily before collapsing into shattered diamonite fragments. Leia’s fingers twitch, sensing a shift in the Force. It’s as if the whole building has suddenly tipped sideways, like everything in this room now balances on the edge of a precipice.

Han’s already on his feet, blaster pistol in hand. His reactive shot has seared a scorch mark straight through the slanted grey slate of their modest one bedroom. _Ah well_ , Leia thinks, past the bubble of panic in her throat, _we were never the white picket fence type._

“What was that?”

“Ben,” Leia strokes her stomach in wonder, “That was Ben. It would seem our sweet-hearted baby boy is a romantic. He doesn’t like it when we fight.”

\-------

Rey is far away, now.

Kylo feels the loss like something scraped clean within himself. He feels _empty, shrunken, brittle_ — but those aren’t the right words either. This is something deeper, a limb missing, a lack of oxygen to the brain, something integral, something _gone_ —

He tries to reach her, but that fucking wall is back in place. He _tries_ , again and again, until his brain is exhausted from the effort and a blood cell bursts behind his eye, tingeing the white with red. _How fitting_.

He starts pressing wrong buttons on the controller, swinging his saber at enemies that aren’t really there, and stalking the ship corridors with listless eyes and bruises in strange places. He has all this raw, biting energy, and at the same time, no energy at all. Something in him grates and chafes and shrieks, appeased only with images of her.

He’s learned that these will come at nightfall, and only if he’s lucky. Her guard goes down when she sleeps — though only marginally, and provided that she _actually_ sleeps, which she mostly doesn’t. A month of desperate, stolen snatches of her, and all he knows is that she’s somewhere cold. He’s seen a landscape of endless snow and ice, spread across the world like ground up glass, the air so clear and sharp that it hurts to breathe. He’s seen her shiver, felt the cold like it was his to bear, so strange and unwelcome to a child of shifting desert sands. He’s felt her toss and turn, shaking underneath blankets heaped upon blankets, her breath a cloudy haze in the air, her feet tinged white and pale blue with frost—

The cold doesn’t bother him, but he feels her hatred and bewilderment towards the climate. So he sends her _warmth_ and wonders if she can feel it. He pulls her deep into his memories of the clear waters of the Naboo lakes, the humidity of Endor’s forests, the deep blue oceans of Scarif. 

All throughout his childhood, his parents were largely absent— his mother gone on affairs of state, his father racing fighters throughout the galaxy— both preoccupied with saving the downtrodden, the oppressed. Everyone was worth rescuing except for him. Was that when the loneliness, the abandonment, the pain crept in?

In the whole galaxy, Kylo has never met anyone who wears pain as vividly as she does, whose every raw expression splashes across her face like bright paint. He thinks _we are so alike_ and the thought both terrifies and exhilarates him.

 _You always were emotional_ , the ghost of Leia whispers in his head.

\-------

Hoth is _freezing_.

All day long, Rey hunches up with the effort of the cold. There are icicles crusted in her eyelashes and snow crystals in her boots. She fashions a covering for her head and face, baring only the few inches of skin around her eyes to the inhospitable climate, and yet the cold finds new and inventive ways to blister across her cheeks.

Her fingers are frostbitten underneath her gloves, her tears frozen before she can cry them. She never thought she’d miss Jakku.

Inexplicably though, nightfall brings warmth. Shaking, Rey coils up under as many blankets as Leia will spare, and dreams of places she’s never seen before: the palace of Naboo, draped in lush greenery, the forests of Endor, filled with yammering Ewoks and purple flowers and canopies of leaves that go on forever, the seas of Scarif, where the sun hits the water and sends glittering fragments of diamonite reflecting off the blue. 

Rey feels the light, relishes in the warmth—and then she wakes up full of emptiness, unsure of what she’s lost and mourning it all the same.

She doesn’t understand how _he_ is still getting through to her. She’s cemented that wall inside of her; it’s never coming down. She’s closed herself off to the Force. She’s ripped Kylo from her soul, and the wound is still festering, a continual throb inside of her.

 _What more could you possibly ask of me?_ She demands of the emptiness, and receives only emptiness in return.

Rey was only five years old, motherless and alone during X’us’R’iia. She remembers how the sand had whipped up in torrents, blotting out the sun. She’d crawled underneath the remains of an Imperial Transport, her hands over her ears, trying not to listen to the sound of her planet ravage itself. For ten hours she’d huddled there, as the cacophony of the desert shrieked and howled, an awful, maudlin melody. When it was all over, she’d broken three fingers and punctured a lung scrabbling through the build up of sand, trying to get out.

She remembers how the desperation had bubbled up in her lungs, how the pain had become a muted background noise, secondary to her wild, all-consuming survival drive. Five years old, and a little child, it had taken her twenty-seven minutes to claw her way to the surface, but she’d done it. She’d laid on the hot sand, the sun a gauzy weight of yellow, blood haloing her hands and her hair.

 _This_ is a lot like that, only now, Rey feels like she is still stuck somewhere in all the sand, struggling to breathe. 

Leia sees. Leia, with her wise eyes and her damaged heart, is no stranger to pain. “How are you, Rey?” she asks, pulling Rey into the walled off section of space in the cave they’ve unofficially delegated as Leia’s. It’s dusty, full of processing parts and the remains of a TIE fighter engine. Rey’s fingers ache to rework the wires. 

“Fine,” she says dully. “Just cold.”

That’s the truth, at least. Her goosebump skin prickles against the lining of her fur jacket. 

Leia scoffs, folds her hands serenely in front of her and waits for an honest answer. Rey shifts from foot to foot, wondering how to tell Ben Solo’s mother that she still _feels_ him, despite all her best efforts. _He spills through in all my dreams_ , she almost says, but then Leia takes the words right from her.

“He’s with you, isn’t he?” Leia asks softly. “The same way I felt Luke? You feel Kylo.”

Rey can’t swallow past the lump in her throat, so she just nods. There are some human connections that you can’t explain away; they just simmer under the surface and wreak havoc, tearing you apart from the inside out, remaking your life as you know it. 

“I cut him out of me,” Rey blurts out. “Closed myself from the Force. It was the _only_ way,” she adds tearfully, because she needs Leia to understand this pain. “I couldn’t save him.”

If she’s being honest with herself, she doesn’t dream about those last moments aboard the _Supremacy_ because they are simply too painful to relive. She promised herself she’d never think about his outstretched glove, those raging fires and glittering debris all around and _You come from nothing, you’re nothing, but not to me_ …She’d turned her back on him, and a thousand, celestial voices had cried out her name, all from his mouth: _Rey!_

R’iias Breath, she’d thought this would get better, that she wouldn’t still bear these ragged, gaping wounds, invisible to everyone but herself.

“There are some people you just can’t save,” Leia says carefully, “Sometimes there are only choices, and the consequences of those choices.”

Rey averts her eyes. She’s not sure what to say to that, when it’s possible that she is one of the people who made a very wrong choice, borne from those quiet moments within the Bond, derived from Kylo’s raging pain, and his _Did Luke tell you the truth about what happened that night?_

Leia’s eyes are wet, and Rey’s heart is hurting, both wounds inflicted upon them by the same man, in different ways. “Maybe you should get off this planet for a little while,” Leia suggests. “Go find yourself, heal yourself, do whatever it is that you need to do.”

Rey lifts her head. “But the Resistance—”

“Will manage,” Leia says firmly, a lilt to her mouth. “We always do.”

\-------

They say that a Force Nexus, or vergence, is any location where a particular aspect of the Force is unusually strong, amplifying a Force-User’s powers.

Rey has only really ever heard of one: the swampy marshes of Degobah, where a young Luke Skywalker had trained with Jedi Master Yoda. But this is not where she heads now.

Korriban, the sole planet of the Horuset system, is the original homeworld of the Sith species and sacred to the Sith Order, housing the tombs of many ancient Dark Lords. 

Rey cannot imagine a place more shrouded in darkness and awash with old, evil power. _Maybe_ , she thinks, _the darkness will help me to understand Kylo. Maybe it will help to end this raging conflict in my soul._

This is where she flees to, now. As she primes the _Falcon_ and speeds away from Hoth, she hears Luke's voice in her head.

_You went straight to the dark. You didn't even fight it._

\-------

Kylo Ren stomps to the observation deck of the _Finalizer_ in a foul mood.

“Hux,” he snarls at the sneering, red-headed general, “care to explain why you sent in the air force?”

Hux shrugs, spreading his hands in supplication “The tide of the battle had turned, Supreme Leader,” he says, “I simply found it more efficient to send our fighters straight to the Capital and end things, rather than giving the ground troops a chance to rally.”

Kylo’s forehead prickles, signaling pain behind his scalp, and he resists the urge to cradle his head in his hands. The ache of missing _her_ has left him dull and unfocused. He does not need this confrontation with Hux now, but there is no other way around it. His second-in-command has been undermining him at every turn. First there was that awful stand on Crait — he refuses to linger on that — then the business on Coruscant, now _this_. 

“Those fighters dropped bombs on your command,” he spits out, “that razed the city, killing all of its inhabitants. Did I, or did I _not_ emphasize that we need to conserve the city’s valuable resources for the First Order’s usage?”

Hux’s mouth curves. “Careful Ren,” he quips, “your compassion is showing.”

Kylo _snarls_. Blind with rage, he hauls Hux up in a vice-like grip, watching grimly as his General’s eyes bulge with pressure. He takes pleasure in twitching his fingers just _so_ , letting the darkness spiral through him, reveling in the ensuing maelstrom of anger-pain-fear. “Speak to me like this again,” he whispers, “and I’ll kill you in the slowest, most painful way I can imagine. And know that I am creative.”

Released, the General sprawls to his feet, coughing and massaging his throat. “Understood, sir.”

It’s then that Kylo hears the distant hum of ancient, ingrained power, of something evil and dormant being suddenly awakened. A jagged spurt of light cries out under the weight of darkness, and something in the Force _tilts_ , in a way that nothing ever should.

Kylo cocks his head. He feels….death, despair. _Rey._..

His pulse spikes. “I must go,” he tells Hux, doing his best impression of a man under control. “I'm needed elsewhere. Have my fighter ready for me.”

\-------

Nothing grows on Korriban.

Emerging from the _Falcon_ , Rey can only see a dark, desert landscape, stretching out for miles, and littered with sharp, purple thorns. Dust motes swirl around her feet. The air is thick with haze and smoke and ancient, untold atrocities. It makes Rey think about the Battle of Mustafar, when Obi-Wan crouched atop the flames of a volcano and dueled Anakin Skywalker for the redemption of his soul.

Chewy howls at her side.

“That’s fine,” Rey squares her shoulders, and adopts a confidence she doesn’t feel. “Stay inside with the ship; I’ll be back.” 

She starts walking, unsure of the direction to go in, but this place...it hums with energy currents, thin sections of dark air bands wound like a spiderweb above her, radiating from somewhere deep within the planet. Rey follows the trails of energy, picking her way carefully through a network of purple thorns that soon give way to blood-red berries. 

A skull cracks open at her feet.

— _Mercy, master. Mercy, please_ —

“Ugh!” Rey squeals aloud. She can feel how this man died, on his knees and begging for mercy, while the Sith above him laughed and made his final moments _hurt_.

Wading through all the horror, Rey tries her best not to let it sting. All of her senses are hyper attuned to her surroundings; she can hear her heart pounding in her ears and see the blood pumping relentlessly through her body. _This place_. The power here is old and vast, enveloping her with it, so much so that she feels drunk, the hairs on her body standing on end.

 _Child of darkness. I know the secret, black desires of your heart. I know for whom you long._

Rey falters. _What had been her purpose, coming here?_ There is so much death on this planet that it sinks her spirit and leadens her limbs. Far off in the distance, she can see the rocky spires of what must be the tombs of the Sith, but she despairs of ever actually reaching it.

A bug crawls over her booted foot, something black and spiny, encased in thick spirals of venom. Rey panics. Reaching for her blaster gun, she only manages to scorch a shot into the barren earth.

“Die!” Rey screeches aloud, her composure cracking violently.

The next round of blaster shots hit the insect, which drops, oozing dark blood, but the noise attracts attention. All around her, the earth stirs. The air suddenly rings with guttural screams as three huge beasts melt out of the landscape, headed straight for her. She only has a moment to register the thick skin, the razor sharp teeth, the protuberance of spines lining the creatures’ backs — and then she’s running as fast as she’s ever run before. 

The earth rises up to meet her as she crashes blindly through undergrowth. She feels thorns tear at her ankles after the fact, but she doesn’t stop. The beasts are snapping at her heels, gaining on her in swift, lumbering strides. Too rattled to calm her mind, Rey turns to face them, emitting a snarl of her own. Blue light glows as she plunges her saber into the belly of the smallest beast that charges at her. She draws back the hilt, and the animal swipes at her with taloned claws, gurgling out its death throes. Rey screams as the claws rake down her shoulder, spilling a fountain of blood across her chest, and kicks the corpse away, spinning to face the other two beast that have fanned out in front of her.

They are enormous, maybe 15 feet tall each, with powerful muscles and wickedly sharp fangs, coated with drool. Their skin is thick enough to deflect blaster bolts and lined with spikes, which come to a barbed point at the end of the creatures’ tails. Awful, tusk-like projections guard their mouths, just above grotesquely long forearms.

 _Rancors_ , Rey thinks reflexively, before remembering where she is. _No, not rancors. Worse. Terentateks_.

Terentateks, creatures which feed off the blood of Force-sensitives, inhabit tombs that are strong with the Dark side of the Force. Rey has heard about them from Luke himself— _Some say they are products of Sith alchemy. Others think they are simply rancors twisted with Dark-side energy_. Regardless, they are considered to be among the most dangerous creatures bred by the Sith, powerful enough that ancient Lore has dubbed them Jedi-Killers.

Rey clears her mind, and does not think about death or Jedi-Killers. Her lightsaber jumps and jolts in her hands, a deadly thing, screaming with volatile energy, enhanced by the planet’s dark Force. One of the creatures pounces on her, and now her saber beam is the only thing separating her from rows and rows of razor teeth. Angling the blade just so, she pushes it into the beast’s shoulder, searing through that thick armor. It hisses, back arching and spines pointing skyward and Rey presses her advantage, wriggling free.

But then there is the other Terentatek, whipping her backwards with its barbed tail, and Rey thinks, _how can it have a tail AND spines AND claws_ , but this is no time for humor. 

She spins and dodges, wielding her blade in a barrage of short, quick strikes, but though she can anticipate those claws, she is not fast enough for the tail. It hits her in the stomach, knocking the breath from her lungs, sending her saber skittering away. 

Pinned on her back, Rey scrabbles desperately at the earth for some sort of purchase. A rivulet of drool drips from the Terentatek’s fangs, and onto her chin. One barbed tusk digs mercilessly into her cheek. Rey closes her eyes. _I am going to die_ , she thinks, with a sort of wonderment. _I came to this godforsaken planet looking for answers, hoping to make sense of my feelings for Kylo, and this is it. I'm going to pay for this mistake with my life._ She opens her eyes, just in time to see awful, red pupils glaring down at her. The creature opens its mouth, fangs extended.

And then. And _then_ —

The gentlest whisper of _him_ , beyond the giant, steel wall in her head. Footsteps, thundering across the ground. The unmistakable shriek of another saber flaring to life. The last thing Rey sees is Kylo Ren’s red blade, swinging effortlessly upward to sever the Terentatek’s head from it’s body.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey smiles. _I’ve never seen you like this before._
> 
>  
> 
> _Like what?_
> 
>  
> 
>  _Happy_ , she tries, but that’s not the right word, and this is something deeper. _Softer_ maybe, like all his edges have been smoothed out with a stone. Kylo has always kept his pain below the surface — she remembers how, back on Starkiller Base, it wasn’t until she’d seen the blood spray on the snow and caught the scent of his fear on the air that she’d realized just how badly wounded he was, and how on the _Supremacy_ , he’d been impassive as Snoke tortured her, only giving himself away in the final throes of the Supreme Leader’s death. But if Kylo has kept his pain buried, then he wears _this feeling_ lightly, bubbling up over the surface, all guard rails down.
> 
>  _Vulnerable_ , she says, finally. _I’ve never seen you this vulnerable before_.
> 
> Kylo closes his eyes and leans into her. The breath leaves him in a shuddering rush as his arms encircle her and his forehead touches hers. _I don’t want the galaxy, Rey_ , and his voice is whisper soft and raw. _I don’t want the wars or the armies or the ships. I only want you._

The last of the Terentateks crumples, torso and head separating grotesquely. The crackling saber hums a red glow through the darkening sky, then falls silent. 

“You are certifiably insane,” Kylo snarls at her, the first words out of his mouth as she springs to her feet. “This planet is _humming_ with power, and instead of tapping into the Force, you’re on your back facing down a Terentatek with a fucking saber. What the hell is wrong with you?”

Rey licks her lips, scuffs one booted toe along the barren earth. She’d rather face down another pair of those beasts before admitting she’s closed herself off from the Force to be free of _him_. Against her will, the gaping hole inside of her stirs and sparks, still unhealed, but soothed somehow, with him so near. “What are you doing here?”

“You don’t seem to understand the fucking gravity of where you are,” He explodes, ignoring her question completely. “From what I understand, you appear to have _willingly_ embarked upon a solo journey to the darkest planet in the entire galaxy. Do you have a death wish?”

“I wasn’t aware that I warranted your concern,” Rey retorts tartly, a defensive note creeping into her words. “Besides, Chewy came with me. I was doing just fine with the Terentateks before you showed up, thanks very much.”

“Clearly, we have different definitions of the phrase _doing just fine_ ,” Kylo seethes, falling back on his trademark sarcasm. “Next time, I’ll just let the monster eat you.” 

“Fine! You do that,” Rey snarls, hating herself for her extreme reaction to him. 

“Good! Fine!”

The wind whips his hair while he glowers at her, all black cloak and black belt and black eyes that go on forever. The air between them roils with unspoken things and unfinished business— his hand around her waist, Snoke falling, the dance of their blades against the Praetorian guards, the quiet intimacy of the Bond, his fingertips tracing her palm and unlocking a world of possibilities, his voice in her head, _Rey, I want you to come with me, Rey, please_ — all utterly unbalancing her. 

She takes a steadying step backwards, but he’s still there, invading her space, eyeing her with those dark, unfathomable eyes. Her palms are suddenly sweaty, despite the heat of the planet, and she worries she will drown in him, in his presence. _At night, desperate to sleep, you dream of an ocean. I see it, I see the island_. 

When she leaps at him, it’s in a battle stance borne from longing and fear, in a explosion of emotion forged from the repression of her feelings. Although the Code dictates that Jedi not give into their emotions, his conflicting darkness calls to her Light, as different halves of the Force, as opposite sides of the same coin — and it just… it feels inevitable and primal, something fated and vast, beyond her control.

_There is no Emotion, There is Peace._

_There is no Passion, There is Serenity._

_There is no Death, There is the Force._

\-------

Kylo senses her pounce a split second before she actually does, barely managing to ignite his saber in time. She still knocks the breath out of him, landing lightly atop his body. Flat on his back, he clumsily blocks her blue blade with his red, his face separated from hers only by the intersecting beams of plasma. Her dark eyes are wild against the planet’s jagged skyline and the combination of red-blue blade-light. She grimaces at him, growls low in her throat, her teeth bared like an animal, her hair a nimbus of strands springing free from her buns.

Both of them grip the saber hilts with two hands. Their fists clash, eliciting a live-wire charge of skin on skin. His heart churns out a mad, rhythmic staccato, his senses in overdrive with the heat of battle and the nearness of her. 

Rey shifts her weight slightly in an attempt to better balance herself, inadvertently rocking her hips against his, and something in Kylo _snaps_. In a splintered moment he’ll forever remember as _her, only her_ , a moment that exists only as gold flecked brown eyes, and the softest skin he’ll ever feel, he leans up across the pulse of their blades, and kisses her.

\-------

The Bond _shrieks_.

Time grinds to a halt.

\-------

At first it’s punishing, raw, volatile, fierce — everything that has marked their relationship thus far. Kylo’s mouth on hers is hungry and demanding, his teeth tapping against hers, not so much kiss as consumption, but then the kiss turns warm, and oddly gentle. He breathes her name out like a prayer, the tendons of his neck stretching taut. Rey closes her eye and kisses him back, feels his lashes flutter against her skin, feels his tongue make lazy, exploratory circles inside her mouth. Sound chokes off as currents inside of her sputter to life. With the Bond open, sensations are magnified, and everything flows like water, blurring together. The weight of Kylo’s desire pulses red behind Rey’s closed eyelids. She thinks she can feel the rotation of the planet, feel their bodies magnetically pulled together by gravity. With her eyes open in the back of his head, she can see herself as he views her—

— the scrunch of her nose, the spread of freckles across her cheekbones —

— _so beautiful, you are so beautiful to me, the most beautiful girl in the galaxy_ —

— The hope, the yearning, that lingers around the edges of his consciousness always, the desperate belief _she’ll come back to me_ warring with the self-loathing _but I don’t deserve her_ —

— The soft wonder of this moment, his lips on hers, his lust melding with something far deeper, his fingertips palming her chin, drawing her closer to him —

 _This_ , he tells her, over and over again. _This is all I want. You. Me. Us._

\-------

Afterwards, they take refuge on the _Falcon_ , curling up next to each other on the bunk. Chewy stands guard, growling disapprovingly, as Rey threads her fingers through Kylo’s, but the Wookiee appears to have made his uneasy peace with Han Solo’s son.

Kylo is staring openly at her, his dark eyes blazing bold trails over the expanse of her body. Rey doesn’t think she’s seen him blink in more than a minute. “What? Something on my face?”

 _You're beautiful_ , He shrugs self-consciously, while the Bond between them sighs, warm and content.

Rey smiles. _I’ve never seen you like this before._

_Like what?_

_Happy_ , she tries, but that’s not the right word, and this is something deeper. _Softer_ maybe, like all his edges have been smoothed out with a stone. Kylo has always kept his pain below the surface — she remembers how, back on Starkiller Base, it wasn’t until she’d seen the blood spray on the snow and caught the acrid scent of his fear on the air that she’d realized just how badly wounded he was, and how on the _Supremacy_ , he’d been impassive as Snoke tortured her, only giving himself away in the final throes of the Supreme Leader’s death. But if Kylo has kept his pain buried, then he wears _this feeling_ lightly, bubbling up over the surface, all guard rails down.

 _Vulnerable_ , she says, finally. _I’ve never seen you this vulnerable before_.

Kylo closes his eyes and leans into her. The breath leaves him in a shuddering rush as his warm arms encircle her and his forehead touches hers. _I don’t want the galaxy, Rey_ , and his voice is whisper soft and raw. _I don’t want the wars or the armies or the ships. I only want you._

Rey cannot breathe for the thickness in her throat. Her fingers search for the pulse in his wrists, a beat that matches hers, mirroring the part of him that takes up too much space inside her.

It’s deep, this thing they share. She knows that, but she doesn’t know how to fix it. She meant to rip it out early on; she thought she had, but the roots just...got stuck a little too deep. And she understands now. To hold the power of the Force, to have the whole universe rest inside your head and think that you’re the last of your kind left … only to find another, just as you are ... 

Kylo smiles gently, thumbing her chin and forcing her eyes to his. “Will you tell me something?”

 _Anything_.

A bigger smile. Dimples. _Holy hell_. “Tell me a story. Something I don’t know about you.”

Rey understands the importance of this request, innocuous as it may seem. He’s already seen so many of her memories, and has taken so much from her mind. _You know I can take whatever I want._ But this — he asks because he wants her to give it to him willingly. He wants to know her.

“OK,” she obliges, closing her eyes and summoning the memory. “I was eleven years old, on Jakku. One day I was out at Starship Graveyard, and stumbled on a Ghtoc 690 light freighter. I investigated and found that the reactor core was still working, so I decided that the whole repaired ship was worth more to Unkar Plutt than it’s salvagable parts.” She swallows hard, and Kylo’s hand traces a steady, comforting path down her back. His eyes bore into hers, listening intently.

She continues, “So I started to work on it, discovering panels inside that I used to hide the ship from other scavengers. I spent nights curled up in the cockpit. I didn’t eat — I couldn’t, I had to use parts I might otherwise have traded for food to repair the ship.” She remembers this all too well: the jagged hollowness, the ache in her stomach that had dogged her for days. She’d pushed it back, promised herself _this will be worth it later_ , even as her fingers had bled and her stomach had screamed in protest. “Two other scavengers, Devi and Strunk, noticed I’d been acting strangely, and tailed me back to the freighter. They brokered a deal to help me repair it, and I promised to split payment with them once we’d sold it back to Unkar Plutt.”

“I didn’t trust them at first, but they helped — they kept watch over the ship at night, once even protecting it from a group of Teedos. Finally, when the ship was ready, I flew it to Niima Outpost with the others. And as soon as I stepped out of it to barter with Plutt, Devi and Strunk, they…” 

“They stole it,” Kylo guesses, “They escaped and flew off the planet, leaving you with nothing to show for all that work.”

“Yeah,” Rey responds gruffly, swiping at her eyes, hot tears welling up at the back of her throat. She remembers this vividly too, the feeling of standing on the desert planet, and of watching her ship get smaller and smaller in the distance. 

_Everyone leaves me. Everyone betrays me. Everyone abandons me_. 

She doesn’t know how to convey the depth of that experience. It had been _her_ ship, _her_ project, and she’d been so _proud_ , and then all that pride had dried up and turned to bitterness at the back of her throat in the space of a heartbeat. It was one of the many, many things that Jakku had taught her — _that you can’t rely on anyone but yourself_ — and that the rebel alliance is teaching her to unlearn.

Kylo is quiet for a very long time. When Rey finally does turn to look at him, she sees a small shimmer in his left palm.

_What is that?_

His eyes are tender, tinted a lighter color than she’s ever seen them before. _It’s a Force projection. Look._

She squints her eyes and looks. And she sees a tiny, green spinebarrel plant, fitted in his palm. “If a little flower can grow on a desolate, desert planet, working its way up through all that sand and all that grime,” he says, “then so too can you survive. Rey, my Rey. You no longer have to seek out light and beauty. You _are_ light and beauty.”

 _Those_ words, spoken in _that_ tone. Rey takes the plant projection from him, and now she finally does cry, happy tears spilling down her cheeks. Kylo holds her, nestling his head between the crooks of her shoulders. 

_Could we have this?_ She wonders to him. _Could we actually have this? Will the galaxy let us have each other?_

His answer rumbles against her bare skin, his lips kissing a tender trail from her shoulders to her cheekbones. “Rey, I want this more than anything.”

\-------

Rey’s sleep is deep and peaceful, interspersed with fleeing figures of her past and present: Unkar Plutt’s leer, Luke’s mechanical hand, Kylo Ren’s kisses, Han Solo tumbling from a dark bridge bathed in a red glow.

Chewy’s abrupt bellow of alarm sounds in her ear. A blaster shot fires so close that she tumbles out of the bunk, hitting her head and snapping violently awake. The first thing she sees is a giant shyrack, which has somehow managed to get aboard the ship, flapping its batlike wings, and snarling with razor sharp teeth. A string of saliva drips down onto one of the control panels.

“Chewy!” Rey screeches, as the Wookiee fires off another shot that the beast dodges, “Stop destroying the ship!” She is momentarily paralyzed, unsure of exactly where her lightsaber is, but not willing to fire a gun for fear of potentially blowing more holes in the _Falcon_.

But now Kylo is blinking himself awake, roused by the commotion, and he takes one look at her and stretches out his right hand, pulling on the Force, freezing the shyrack in place. 

Dark, putrid energy pours through the Bond, tainting their connection. Rey feels the rush of his excitement, so heady and intoxicating that she feels lightheaded. Her receptors go haywire, blood rushing to her brain, as he _laughs_ obscenely, his fingers splayed, while the shyrack twists and shrieks in midair.

He makes a violent, jerking gesture with his hand, and the shyrack _splits in half_.

\-------

Rey and Chewy are both staring at him. Even the Wookiee’s mouth is open.

“What?” he scowls, as the two halves of the dead creature flop limply to the floor of the Falcon. Then, sarcastically, “You’re welcome for saving you. What’s for breakfast?”

Rey trawls him as he pulls on his cowl and exits the ship. “What was that all about?”

“What do you mean?”

“ _That_ ,” she jerks her head back in the direction of the ship, and he studies his hands instead of her face. _Careful now,_ he hears Luke in his head, the memory of his old master’s admonishments after Kylo had killed his first dragon snake in the swamps of Nal Hutta, _there wasn’t a need to stop its heart so dramatically like that, now, was there?_

He wonders if Luke had felt the rising darkness in him, even then. He wants to tell Rey that he’ll always protect her, that he’ll kill for her without blinking, because that’s how much she means to him. Instead, he shrugs and says, “The shyrack was going to hurt you.”

“But you _laughed_ ,” she said, confused, her big brown eyes widening. “You laughed as you tortured it and split it apart.”

A wave of fear rises up in him, so swift and fierce that it overpowers everything else. He can feel her retreating from him, can feel the Bond start to go dark. “No Rey, don’t.”

“Don’t _what_?” she demands, her hands balled into fists, the first tell-tale sign of tears starting to glisten in her eyes. 

“Don’t do this.” He crosses the distance between them, chafing her smaller hands in his big ones. “Don’t close yourself off from me, not now when we’ve found each other.”

She’s opening her mouth to argue, so he does the only thing he can think of to make her shut up. Her kisses her.

\-------

She is helpless against him.

It is the kind of kiss that makes her mind go dark, a dirty, devouring kiss that utterly overwhelms her and blocks out the rest of the world. She winds her arms around his neck for support, while he huffs a smile against the corner of her mouth, his breath against hers making her insides go shivery. Each kiss is slow and lingering and fierce, like he is trying to tell her something important, something that she instinctively knows, but is not yet ready to face. 

The Bond between them is a soft, silvery thread — though Rey remembers it’s capacity for Darkness. She can still feel the remnants of the Dark Sider energy he’d poured through into her mind, as he'd asphyxiated the shyrack, laughing, reveling in it’s desperate fear, it’s _pain_ — 

“No!” Rey cries aloud, tearing her mouth from his. Kylo's mouth is swollen, his eyes rapidly fading from open to cautious. 

“Rey,” he whispers, “My Rey.”

“No,” she pleads. “Kylo, there is darkness in you. I cannot pretend there isn’t.”

He clenches his fists, raising one eyebrow. “And there isn’t in you?”

She swipes a hand across her face, cutting off the tears. “Of course there is. But I made a choice and you made a different one.”

“But I choose _you_.”

She shakes her head brokenly. “It’s too late.”

“Rey,” he screams after her as she walks away. “No! Don’t go! Don’t leave me!”

The sound tears at her heart, but what’s done is done. Until he comes racing across the barren terrain, his teeth locked in a growl, his hand a vice around her upper arm. “I’m _not_ letting you walk away from me.”

“Let go of me, Kylo.”

“No,” he grinds out. “You’re mine.”

Rey can feel the Force aching under the full weight of his sorrow, torn apart by his myriad open wounds that bleed and fester and ache. 

_Force, this cannot be right. I was wrong for trusting in my instincts. We cannot be meant for each other. Not like this._

She closes her eyes and reaches out with her Feelings, the same way Luke had taught her back on Ahch-To. She feels the nexus of power inside of her, a spiraling, glowing sphere of energy that she harnesses. Her saber hurtles through the air, jumping into her fist with an easy familiarity as she ignites the blade and adopts an opening battle stance.

Kylo’s eyes widen. “So be it,” he says, and now his own weapon is blazing into existence, their Bond singing dangerously, poised on a knifeblade’s edge. 

Rey attacks first, closing the distance between them with a series of tight spins. Kylo catches her upward slash, the hilt of her blade wedging into his crossguard, but she ducks free, breaking the lock, and he drops his body backwards to dodge her next thrust. The sun is in her eyes, but she’s grown up on Jakku, and she’s used to fighting under an unforgiving glare. 

Kylo stretches out his free hand, Force-shoving her away from him. Knocked backwards, she retaliates with her own power, wrapping the Force around him in a constricting vice. Kylo struggles, clawing at his throat, but she viciously _tightens_ her hold, cloaking herself in tendrils of power, _twisting_ , her adrenaline spiking and —

 _Rey. I love you_.

She gasps aloud into the silence. Kylo wrenches himself out of her pull, twisting his body in mid-air so that the two of them collide, their still-blazing sabers skittering from their grasps and rolling harmlessly across the dusty earth. 

On his knees, he reaches for her, as if she is his first thought, his first priority. _You know it’s true. And I know you feel it too_.

Her cheeks are wet and slick with tears. With a shocking burst of strength, she rears back and punches him in the face.

His world goes black around the edges, her eyes at the center at his vision, the last thing he sees before he loses consciousness completely.

\-------

“I’m fine Chewy,” Rey reassures the Wookiee, as another tear slides down her nose and splashes onto the compressor. The _Falcon_ smells like death and guts, the decaying body of the shyrack slipping a wet, black path down the ship’s hull. Fingering the control buttons, Rey makes a huge effort to compose herself, willing herself away from the mind of the unconscious Sith Lord tied up at the back of the ship. She doesn’t think about his eyes or his touch or his kisses. Or about —

_I love you, Rey._

“We’re ready to make the jump,” Rey calls back to her co-pilot, who roars in acknowledgment. 

The _Falcon_ hurtles forward in a dizzying burst of speed, starlines streaking across her vision, neon-and-black blurs flashing across the backs of her eyelids. Emerging suddenly out of hyperspeed, the planet Hoth gleams below, white and frozen and pure.

 _I love you, Rey._

Rey wipes away another wayward tear, flicking her comm link on in a burst of static. “Please inform General Organa that we have her son, Supreme Leader Ren, in rebel custody.”

_You know it’s true. And I know you feel it too._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth is that Kylo had laughed as he’d torn a shyrack in half, but he’d also cupped a holographic spinebarrel in his hands and whispered, _Rey, you are my light and my beauty._ The truth is that just as Kylo’s saber scythes across the universe, so too does his love for her. The Bond is closed now, but she doesn’t need to feel it to know it — even the mere thought of it is enough to bring her to her knees. If love were a color, then Kylo’s would be a prism of white: a refraction of colors, elusive, ever changing, blindingly brilliant, complicated. The truth is that Kylo has always loved her, and maybe she has always loved him, but she can never, _ever_ admit it. The truth is that Love cannot be dictated by _Dark_ or _Light_ , not when it exists in shades of grey. Force knows it has torn whole civilizations apart and justified the murder of innocents. Force knows it has also rebuilt the galaxy and wrought the redemption of Luke Skywalker's infamous father.
> 
> She clears her throat. “Kylo Ren’s fate lies in the hands in the Council. I trust in the Tribunal to determine an appropriate decision.”

“General Organa, consider Kylo Ren’s transgressions — under no circumstances can he be allowed to live. You know this. Do not let a mother’s love blind you to doing the right thing.”

The Gran, ironically named _Pax_ , is head of the tribunal council, a fledgling Senatorial forum that has come together following the destruction of the Galactic Republic by Starkiller. The Tribunal touched down on Hoth just yesterday, summoned by the urgent missive that the rebels held Kylo Ren captive on the remote planet. 

There is no real place for them to meet, so they’d gathered together in one of the more remote recesses of their base cave, spreading out awkwardly in mismatched chairs. Rey can tell from Pax’s pinched features that the Gran most definitely does _not_ approve.

“These are most untoward circumstances,” she’d heard him mutter yesterday, sweeping dismissively past her while she’d worked on the _Falcon_ in the hangar. BB8 had beeped out some choice swear words, making her grin underneath a tangle of wires. 

“And to which transgression are you referring exactly?” Leia snaps, so sharply that Rey glances over at the General in surprise. Neither of them have talked about Kylo — when Rey had landed back on Hoth with the unconscious Supreme Leader in tow, her face streaked grey with dirt, exhaustion and _pain_ — Leia’s features had flickered only for a moment, before her back had straightened and she was barking out a series of clipped commands. Their holding cells weren’t equipped to imprison someone with such strong Force sensitivities as Kylo, so Leia had dispatched Finn and Rose to Myrkr in search of _ysalamir_ , tree-like creatures, known for their ability to neutralize the Force. 

( _Never thought I'd be indebted to a bunch of lizards_ , Finn had cooed, stroking one of the creature’s backs, which had promptly arched an impressive array of spines…) 

Any doubts Rey had as to whether or not the ysalamir would be effective against Kylo were put to rest later that night. She’d been kicking her cot, lost in a childish haze of rage and pain, prompting Poe to rush in and hold her still, and all the while the Bond had been _silent_. There had been no reactive sensation of jealous possession, no anger, no sadness. _Nothing_ had vibrated through her bloodstream, _nothing_ had resonated in her heart and pulsed in her palms.

_If Kylo died, this would be the rest of her life...this black, empty void._

“There can be no other punishment but death,” Pax says, in response to Leia’s earlier comment. His three-eyed stare is eerie in intensity. One antenna quivers indignantly as he slams at his thigh with a spiny fist. “Kylo Ren is responsible for the death of thousands. He must die.” 

Rey shivers, and for once it’s not due to the cold. She’s remembering that dreamscape place that always used to be theirs, his black eyes that go on and on, and his quiet acceptance of her revulsion, as if he'd expected it, as if he'd steeled himself to the fact that others no longer saw a human when they looked to him.

_It’s true, I am a monster._

Leia says, “The First Order is finished. Earlier today, Kylo Ren provided valuable intel that enabled our fighter pilots to scatter and capture the remains of their fleet. Please. Show mercy.”

Rey blinks, shocked. She didn’t know this. No one … no one told her.

The Gran is unimpressed. “Kylo Ren provided intel only hoping to save his own skin,” he waves a hand. “This man has personally executed so many of our own. Our dead would be rolling over in their graves to see your impassioned defense of a _murderer._ ”

His lip curls into a snarl but General Organa is undeterred. “Please,” she repeats, spreading her hands in supplication. “This is revenge, not justice. How are we any better than _they _are if we stoop to their methods?”__

____

____

_“Better?"_ The Gran arches an eyebrow. “This isn't about being _better_ ; this is about doing what's _right_. For over a century, ever since the rise of Darth Vader, our dead have been screaming for vengeance.” His disdainful look to Leia is intentional, the subtext behind his words obvious: _it would have been better for the galaxy if the whole Skywalker lineage had been wiped out at birth._

Rey swallows hard, and in the sudden stillness of the room, it is a loud, gulping sound. The Gran swivels to face her, all three of his eyes narrowing. “I’d like to hear from you,” he says, pointing. “As General Dameron is away with the rest of the fighters, you’re the next best person to bear witness to Kylo Ren’s actions.”

“Oh. I don’t think...” Rey begins, but now everyone is looking to her expectantly.

“You were the one to capture him and bring him here. What do you think Kylo Ren’s fate should be?” Pax asks her, and Rey can _feel_ Leia’s absolute stillness next to her.

Rey presses her thumbs to her eyes, wanting to run away. Here is her chance to talk about the thing she’s buried down deep, to tell everyone the truth about what really happened back in Snoke’s throne room. The truth is that Kylo had wielded a wall of pure, bright Light to distract Snoke long enough to plunge the saber into his side. The truth is that Rey’s palms had been filled with blue, crackling Force lightning, that bastion of Dark Sider energy. The truth is that the Sith holocrons in Snoke’s throne room had crooned to her from the walls, just as that Dark, shadowy cave back on Ahch-To had whispered to her, just as the planetary home of the Sith had seemed the most natural place for her to flee.

_You went straight to the Dark. You didn’t even try to fight it._

The truth is that Kylo had laughed as he’d torn a shyrack in half, but he’d also cupped a holographic spinebarrel in his hands and whispered, _Rey, you are my light and my beauty._ The truth is that just as Kylo’s saber scythes across the universe, so too does his love for her. The Bond is closed now, but she doesn’t need to feel it to know it — even the mere thought of it is enough to bring her to her knees. If love were a color, then Kylo’s would be a prism of white: a refraction of colors, elusive, ever changing, blindingly brilliant, complicated. The truth is that Kylo has always loved her, and maybe she has always loved him, but she can never, _ever_ admit it. The truth is that Love cannot be dictated by _Dark_ or _Light_ , not when it exists in shades of grey. Force knows it has torn whole civilizations apart and justified the murder of innocents. Force knows it has also rebuilt the galaxy and wrought the redemption of Luke Skywalker's infamous father. 

She clears her throat. “Kylo Ren’s fate lies in the hands in the Council. I trust in the Tribunal to determine an appropriate decision.”

Next to her, Leia’s breath catches in her throat, but Rey doesn’t dare look at the General.

__\-------_ _

__  
__  


__When Kylo was six years old, his parents took him on a trip to Lux, a planet lost in the Outer Rim._ _

____

Leia had mentioned that she was working on trade deals with some of the sentient beings there, but after the third night of playing cards together as a family, Kylo had understood the truth. 

Paradoxically, this was not work. This was… a _vacation_.

Lux was named for its quality of light. The sunshine was fairly blinding, dazzling, white instead of golden yellow. The sky was light for around 21 hours a day, so they activated panels that closed down over the windows, and slept with eye masks on. Every morning, Kylo had woken to a cacophony of birdsong, and incandescent rays of brightness illuminating every corner of his bedroom. Here, there were no shadows, and no places to hide, everything screaming _exposure_. All that sunshine meant you couldn’t be anything other than yourself. 

He’d long since left Lux behind as he’d later taken up the mantle of the Sith, as he’d favored black, and dimmed down the lights of the cabin on the _Supremacy_. Darkness hid the shadows on his face, and dulled the conflict in his eyes.

When he’d met Rey for the first time, light had exploded back into his world, making him remember that long ago world of eternal sunshine. H’d looked at her, and her eyes were incandescent, diamantine, brilliant. But underneath all that, there was the shadow of something else, a shifting pain, a deeply buried hurt, a loneliness he’d instinctively understood. 

He’d fallen in love with her, both for her light and her darkness.

\-------

_His smile is easy, his eyes soft. His lips are soft too, when she brushes them with the tip of her finger, and his arms encircle her._

_It goes like this._

_One, two,_ three _seconds of silence, of skin sizzling on skin, of mouths sucking on mouths — and then the city all around them erupts in flames. She watches an entire civilization turn to sand in a second, bricks to clay, blocks to lime. This is how quick he is. He takes the world with him, rips up foundations, tears families apart, flicks his fingers and leaves a singular trail of devastation in his wake._

_And while she stands there, too horrified to run or scream or help, he only smiles, his lips still swollen with the imprint of her kisses._

_I did it for you, he tells her. Rey, everything I do, I do for you._

She wakes up with a jolt that feels like falling and landing hard. Her heart is pounding, her body a knotted tangle of confusion and fear. Once, back on Jakku, a trader from Niima told her the story of a pilot who contracted an awful space sickness after getting caught in Bespin's gaseous atmosphere, resulting in the loss of nerve endings. For weeks, the pilot wandered around his ship, accidentally burning his fingertips and stubbing his toes, totally immune to any sort of pain. Finally, terrified at his body’s numbness, he got a knife and started slicing into his own skin, desperate to feel something, _anything_.

While part of Rey thinks that the trader had only told her the story to scare her, another, bigger part of her thinks that it wouldn’t be so bad. She is so tired, so raw around the edges. To be numb would be a relief, Jedi code be damned. 

It’s dark in the cave, but Rey doesn’t need to see to find her way around. Wrapping her jacket securely around herself, she tucks her hair under the hood and pads across the hangar and down the steps. Wind blows steadily through the cavern, whistling lightly across exposed openings. A few feet away from the holding cell, she starts to feel it: a curious blankness, a void in the Force. She reaches, and it feels like a giant bubble, absorbing her power, but not taking it. _Ysalamir_ , she remembers, gritting her teeth, closing her eyes and pushing _harder_ —

“Hey!” Someone says. “You’re not supposed to be down here.”

It’s Tallie, a blonde Resistance fighter that Rey recognizes only vaguely. Rey was still on Ahch-To when the fighter pilots led the raid on the dreadnought, but Poe filled her in on some of the details. Tallie’s friend was Paige, Rose’s sister — the girl who climbed up the ladder after the rest of her team was killed, who activated the bombs, who closed her eyes and cupped her necklace as she was consumed in a hot haze of fiery glory. What is Rey supposed to say to her: _Stand aside. I'm here to comfort the Supreme Leader of the First Order?_

That'd go down well.

“I'm...uh,” Rey falters, swallowing around the acid in her throat, while Tallie pins her with a look somewhere between thinly veiled disbelief and accusation. Throwing caution to the wind, Rey centers her mind, drawing in a deep breath from her core, and says, “You will give me the keys to the cell.”

Tallie’s eyes go glassy. She unbuckles the brass key from her belt, drops it in Rey’s outstretched palm. 

“You will leave this place and forget what really happened here.”

Tallie’s head bobs in acquiescence. “I will leave this place and forget what really happened here,” she repeats.

“Kylo Ren escaped his cell,” Rey tells the girl, “He compelled you with the Force. No one is to be blamed for his escape.”

Tallie wavers on the spot, nodding in understanding, her eyes out of focus. Rey winces slightly, watching her trail away, before turning back to the door. Her fingers catch on the lock as she slips it free, slides it open, and suddenly, she’s in a cold stone recess full of his heady Force signature. One of the prowling ysalamir hisses at her, back arched, spines prickling, and she doesn’t even notice. Kylo’s head snaps up at her. The skin underneath his eyes is dark and smudged, bruised like old fruit, but his expression is bright and sharp and awake. 

He only says, “I knew you’d come.”

“Did you?” Rey wonders if she is having a heart attack. Her chest is all beat and no breath, tightness sharpening the air from her throat. She crosses the space to his cell, cocking her head to look up at him. He is so tall, something she sometimes forgets when she is away from him, but it goes deeper than mere physicality. Kylo demands space; he steals the air from every room he enters.

She unlocks the cell door clumsily, her fingers shaking. “I’m trusting you,” she whispers, “not to go running straight back to the First Order.”

He scoffs. “There is no First Order left. I provided the Resistance with all the information they needed to destroy them.”

Rey cups the open cell door with her palm, muffling the sound of the bars against the snowy walls. “And why would you do that?”

Kylo’s knuckles brush a gentle path down her cheek, the pad of his thumb catching her bottom lip. “Don't pretend you don't know.”

No one has ever looked at her the way Kylo does, with such fierce longing, as if she is sun and stars and moons and planetary pulls, and everything in between. She reaches for him, the Bond singing wildly, Dark energy blooming between their fingertips. _Passion belongs to the Dark_. “I’m sorry.”

“For what, my love?” His breathing is harsh, his heartbeat a jagged, erratic echo of her own. 

“For this,” she gestures at the cell, “for punching you before. I didn’t mean — I mean I _did_ , but I _didn’t_ —”

Kylo’s laugh rumbles against her body. “I scare you.”

“Yes,” she admits. Longing drips a molten pool in her stomach, but she resists the urge to run her fingers through his hair and suck kisses down the column of his neck. “Back in Snoke’s throne room —”

“You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” Kylo interrupts. “Your body in battle stance, your eyes wild, and that blue lightning erupting all around. You were a goddess.”

Rey bites her lips, pleased and ashamed all at once. “There’s a part of me that responds to the Dark,” she admits, “The ghosts of the Sith speak to me. Your soul calls to mine. Maybe it’s time I stop running. Maybe you can teach me.”

Kylo’s eyes are fire. “Come with me.”

She shakes her head, a wordless no. “Not yet. I cannot abandon the rebels tonight; they’ll know I freed you.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “And?”

“I will meet you soon, I promise. As soon as I am able.”

He presses his lips to her temple. “Do not wait too long.”

“Or?”

“Or I will burn down the galaxy to find you.”

She smiles; this is the Kylo she knows. For a long while, the two of them don’t say anything further, but he holds her tight, brushing kisses across her nose, her cheeks, her mouth — as she closes her eyes and surrenders to the darkness in her soul.

\-------

After Kylo is gone, she keeps busy.

She and Poe lead an attack on the planet Bespin, where General Hux and fringe pockets of First Order members are believed to be camping out. The tip off proves to be correct, and they’re ambushed by a white tide of stormtrooper battalions immediately upon planetfall. Rey deflects enemy lasers while additional Resistance fighters provide cover fire, but in the melee, she takes a blaster shot to the hip, and Kylo’s voice explodes in her head.

_K’oyacyi!_

She scowls. _I didn’t know you knew Mandalorian._

His voice turns seductive, promising darker, carnal things. _There are so many things you don’t know about me, my love._

She blushes furiously, her skin warming, her soft expression conspicuously out of place among the tide of battle. _Now’s not the time, Kylo. I’m a little busy here._

“Rey!” Poe calls out to her in warning, and her gaze sharpens back to her present surroundings, just in time to see General Hux charging at her. She pounces, meeting him in the air in mid-strike, his blaster shot firing so close that the wind of it ruffles her hair as it streaks by.

“So, we meet again, little desert rat,” Hux taunts. “And tell me, how does Kylo fare? Was he ever able to be reunited with his _dear_ , departed love?”

Rage dims her vision. Rey doesn’t even bother toying with him. Sapphire saber humming through the air in tandem with the volleys of gunfire, she stretches out her free hand and _blinds_ him, unleashing a violent surge of power that literally singes the eyeballs straight from his sockets. Whiplash from the Force attack scorches the whole face of the planet, rippling up streams of yellow-grey gaseous patterns, and Hux screams, twisting away in panic at the abrupt loss of sight. Dark Force energy sizzles through her veins, and Rey lopes off his head in one clean strike.

_You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Your body in battle stance, your eyes wild, and that blue lightning erupting all around. You were a goddess._

Her heart is hammering fit to burst, acid spilling onto her tongue, an awful, vivid freedom filling up her lungs. 

Kylo’s burn of pride ricocheting around in her skull is even more palpable than the blaster wound at her hip.

\-------

_Where are you now,_ Rey asks him later on.

 _Mimban, until next week at least_ , Kylo responds, pushing pictures into her head. Electricity from the planet’s explosive energy storms blazes across her consciousness in a kaleidoscope of dark reddish blues. The world there is cold and damp, an uncharted jungle wreathed in perennial mists, a shifting blur of dark green lost among trees as tall as mountains. She sees pictures of the Hssiss, miniature Dark dragon creatures that compensate for their small stature with speed and viciousness. 

Cocooned in her cot back on Hoth, Rey blinks in the glassy darkness and watches her breath make little puffs of air. 

Be careful, she tells him, _Ib’tuur jatne tuur ash’ad kyr’amur._

His smile ripples through the Bond. _I didn’t know you spoke Mandalorian._

_Well, she scoffs, that’s just one of many things you don’t know about me._

\-------

Weeks go by, the passage of time recorded in ticks against the wall of a stone temple. (Kylo does it because it makes him think of Rey on Jakku, a scavenger hunched over shifting sands, and waiting, desperately, _desperately_ for her family to come back. So too does he wait for her).

The ache of missing her is etched on his chest like a bruise, each day a different shade of feeling, inhaled in, exhaled out, but never really gone. It’s lessened a little by being in her head, but nothing compares to the pure _physicality_ of her: warm and sweet and strong. 

The days take on a monotony that even planet-hopping can’t dispel. (In his defense, he’s spent his childhood training to be a Jedi, only to turn to the Dark Side, to murder his father, his master, to fall in love with the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, to go on to rule the galaxy as Supreme Leader — he’s full of a visceral, rippling energy; fair to say he bores easily…)

And then. And _then_ —

Almost two months to the day that she freed him from his prison cell on Hoth, he awakens to the Force _bleeding._

It’s been stable for a while now, the steadying of his relationship with Rey having helped the Force to Balance. But this...this is something entirely different, a blast of pure evil, a darkness so deep you could drown in it, so dangerous that the very universe cries out in protest. It’s something akin to the scale of Anakin Skywalker slaughtering younglings at the Jedi temple. 

_There is a new darkness rising._

_Kylo_ , he feels Rey call him, her horror transmitting across the stars.

 _Rey_ , he responds, _Come to me._

 _Yes,_ she replies. _Yes. We will fight this together._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K’oyacyi: [Mandalorian, a command]: "Stay alive!"
> 
> Ib’tuur jatne tuur ash’ad kyr’amur: [Mandalorian] "Today is a good day for someone else to die."


End file.
